Cairde Visual

Exhibitions
Written By Robyn Daly
 

Cairde Visual 2026, the annual open submission exhibition presented as part of the Cairde Sligo Arts Festival, brought together work by contemporary artists from Ireland and internationally for its 11th edition this summer.

Installation view of Cairde Visual 2026 at Hamilton Gallery, Sligo, showing contemporary artworks displayed on white gallery walls, including Robyn Daly’s Somewhere It’s Sunny.

Presented across Hamilton Gallery and Hyde Bridge Gallery in Sligo, Cairde Visual has become an established part of the festival’s visual arts programme, encompassing photography, painting, sculpture, drawing, print and mixed media. More than 500 works were submitted to Cairde Visual through its submission process.

Irish fine-art photographer Robyn Daly was represented in this year’s exhibition by two works, Sense of Self and Somewhere It’s Sunny, both shown among the 77 works at Hamilton Gallery.

Although visually very different, the two works share concerns central to Daly’s wider practice: female subjectivity, embodiment, and the relationship between the body and the world it inhabits.

Sense of Self by Robyn Daly, a fine-art photograph of a female figure distorted through movement, her body and face shifting against the surrounding interior.

Sense of Self reimagines the female form in an expression of intimacy.

Sense of Self is a body refusing to resolve into a singular, fixed identity, opening onto a more complex idea of the self as lived from within.

Somewhere It’s Sunny places the female figure at a threshold holding an unmistakably Irish irony and a note of hope.

Somewhere It’s Sunny by Robyn Daly, a fine-art photograph of a blurred female figure in a vivid yellow dress beside a window reflecting blue sky and trees against the grey exterior of an Irish house.

Somewhere It’s Sunny by Robyn Daly finds in liminality the possibility of hope.

The festival runs from 4th to 17th July 2026 in Sligo.

View of Sligo, Ireland, with colourful flowers lining the River Garavogue and a blue pedestrian bridge crossing the water, where the Cairde Sligo Arts Festival and Cairde Visual take place.

Sligo in summer: host to the Cairde Visual exhibition each year in which Robyn Daly’s work featured.

Exterior of Hamilton Gallery in Sligo, Ireland, with its distinctive purple-painted façade and entrance, one of the venues for Cairde Visual 2026.

Hamilton Gallery is one of two galleries for Cairde Visual 2026.

 
Robyn Daly
Previous

The Chemistry Of Me – Hunger magazine Issue 39
Next

Courthouse Gallery & Studios